Agentic Banking’s Biggest Blind Spot, with Dr. Efi Pylarinou

The KPI nobody should be optimizing for: #

Dr. Efi Pylarinou, fintech & tech advisor and Strategic Industry Advisor to Backbase, flags the most common mistake she heard discussed at Fintech Meetup Europe: treating “maximize the number of agents, minimize human intervention” as the goal of an agentic workflow redesign. Her sharper framing — “spray the same Altman spray everywhere and see where it sticks” — and her answer is that the right mix of agents versus deterministic flows depends entirely on the use case, which is exactly why she’s building new dashboards for measuring agent swarm performance, the subject of her upcoming Fast Future Executive talk on October 20th.

Why “it’s not the holy grail”: #

Pylarinou pushes directly against the idea that AI alone resolves organizational complexity: “it’s not the holy grail for hacking complexity.” Intelligence, she argues, isn’t a purely technical problem; it’s a question banks are only starting to grapple with about what’s left for humans to decide, and where value and power actually shift once agents start making decisions.

Brett King’s “Bank 5.0” and the Holy Trinity: #

Pylarinou is a contributing author to Brett King’s upcoming book Bank 5.0: The Rise of the Agentic Bank (out November 2026), writing a chapter she calls the Holy Trinity — three questions banks need to answer simultaneously rather than in isolation, because, as she puts it, “you can’t silo a part of your business and just focus on that and ignore the other parts.”

The flippening: open-weight models just overtook the frontier: #

Pylarinou cites a sharp shift in model usage over the past few months: from roughly 80% frontier-model usage down to 20%, with open-weight models now taking the majority share for lower-stakes, cost- and latency-sensitive workloads.

Her takeaway: build model-agnostic, because sovereignty, cost, and commoditization pressures mean today’s dominant model won’t stay dominant.

Why listen: #

For anyone trying to separate real agentic-AI progress from hype, this conversation offers a pointed critique of lazy KPIs, a preview of where Brett King’s next book is headed, and a clear-eyed read on why Europe’s own stablecoin and identity infrastructure is the next real opportunity.